The Shadow Proves the Sunshine

When I began reading Sisterhood Everlasting, I was prepared for the worst.  As a lover of Ann Brashares Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, I thought, why would Ann write more about the girls after seeming to end the story in Forever in Blue? I saw the book as simply a moneymaker:  get sisterhood fans to buy more from her.  But, I had to read it.  It was Lena, Bridget, Carmen, and Tibby.  I wanted to know where Ann had taken them after college.
As I began Sisterhood Everlasting, I was unimpressed.  The girls seemed disconnected from each other, and that's not how I pictured their lives turning out.  But I continued to read, especially with the knowledge that they were going to be together again, as the inside cover boasted.
Upon the reunion of the girls, I began to really dislike the book.  Ann nearly killed me with the first plot twist.  She made me hate Tibby, whom I loved in the other books.  I was devastated with what Tibby did, but I continued to read, hoping for something good to happen.  I read a good 150 pages, and still, everything was wrong.  The sisterhood was horribly crippled and the lives of all four girls were going downhill fast.  I nearly stopped reading, but my internal optimism won out.  It has to get better, it just has to, I thought.  So I read, and I read.  I got so caught up in the story, it was after midnight when I finally finished.  And it did get better.  In fact, by the end, I was overwhelmingly satisfied with the book. 
As I've already said, I loved the original young adult series, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.  They were lighthearted, easy summer reading.  Perfect for a lazy afternoon outdoors.  But with Sisterhood Everlasting, Ann took her writing to a new level.  I'd read her other Adult novel, The Last Summer (of You and Me) but wasn't exactly impressed.  It was an all right novel.  I didn't feel it touched on anything too deep.  Ann's latest though, pulled at my heartstrings.  After having spent so much time with Lena, Tibby, Carmen, and Bridget, I felt I knew the girls.  I could see bits of myself in all four of them.  Lena, quiet and shy around the boys.  Tibby, not knowing how to tell the people she cares about most how she truly feels.  Carmen, bold and dramatic.  Bridget, running- not only running on her own two legs, but emotionally running from the past.  I expected the girls to have grown up a little in Sisterhood Everlasting.  After all, it was ten years down the line.  They didn't start out so different though.  Each still had her issues.  However, there was something more.  After about the halfway point in the novel, I saw the girls starting to confront some of their issues.  But it was more than that.  In Ann's latest novel, I connected more with the characters than ever before.  She made the girls feel more real than ever before.  I saw more of their issues, I read more of their thoughts.  This is why I continued to read... not only was I hoping for a better story, but I truly felt the girls' feelings. 
The character whose voice came through the most for me was Bee.  I had always liked Bee, because no matter how much she struggled to run from her feelings, she always ended up facing them with courage and tried to learn from them.  In Sisterhood Everlasting, I read as Bee struggled through the weight of her mom's suicide yet again, but through a different lens.  I feel like she finally realized that she wasn't her mom.  I think deep down, she always saw her mom's depression in herself and worried she would be like her mom. 
I cried more than once through this novel laced with pain.  Yet in the pain, there was healing.  I believe Ann wrote beautifully on finding joy through grief. 
The other thing I think Ann Brashares did wonderfully throughout the novel was to find great quotes.  If you have ever read the Sisterhood novels, you may remember that between every chapter is a quote.  It's normally a quote relating to the chapter ahead, and it's normally decent.  I found the quotes in Sisterhood Everlasting to be poignant, thought-provoking, and elegant.  She perfectly places pieces of poems by T.S. Eliot, quotes from Winston Churchill and lyrics from the Shins and other artists.  My two favorite found in the book sum up some of the issues and feelings confronted in the book perfectly.  Both are from T.S. Eliot:

"This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang

but a whimper."

"I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different."

 Sisterhood Everlasting is, in my opinion, a poignant, sometimes jarring novel that reaches to the core of human feelings.  Sisterhood fans:  read on.  For those of you new to the sisterhood, go ahead and read it too.